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Toughie 230

by tilsit  

Toughie No 230 by Giovanni

This Crossword is Brought to You by…..

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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****

An interesting challenge today which I found quite tough in parts and blindingly easy in others.  I particularly struggled with the bottom left corner.  As I solve the puzzle on line, I usually play guess the setter until I can contact a chum who takes the paper.  I have to say I wouldn’t have guessed today’s was Giovanni, it didn’t feel like one of his puzzles.  However, it was the usual enjoyable mix of witty but scrupulously fair clues.  Aspiring setters should always take time to study Giovanni’s clues as they are an absolutel model of perfection.

Recently it was announced that ITV are to be allowed to infest their already dreary programmes with product placement, and I thought this had arrived early in Crossword-land today as 6 across required you to know the name of a leading motor-oil brand (other leading brands of motor oil are available) to help you solve the clue.  Some curious answers today including the name of a Cultural Colossus (see yesterday’s Crossword blog).

Off we go, and remember your home is at risk if you put a tin containing petrol in your microwave and turn it on….

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DT 26053

by tilsit  

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26053

Oh No It’s Not! Oh Yes It Is!! Er….Oh No It’s Not!!!

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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****

A lovely puzzle with some really good clues, especially the clever ones at 9 across, 26 across and . However, some of your bloggers have been involved in heated debate today over one clue in particular. 6 across refers to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. At first I solved it and thought it was a nice clue but then I started to wonder if Abel was the Third Man. Checks with that eminent theologian, The slightly Reverend Big Dave revealed that Abel was indeed the Third Man, after Adam and Cain. I had forgotten about Eve’s sex, but let’s not go there. Fine thought I, nice clue, and move on. Wrong! Of course Cain murdered Abel; everyone worked that out without calling in Miss Marple. So therefore Abel was the victim! By now the other bloggers had joined in and I suspect it’s a misprint and should have read “This victim was The Third Man”.

Enough of matters theological. On with the blog. Don’t forget to have your say and to mark the puzzle with the star rating system. New posters should be aware that we keep the answers hidden between the curly brackets and that they need to be highlighted with your mouse to reveal them. First-time posters on the blog should also know that their posts sometimes take a little while to appear as they have to be moderated to check we are not being attaced by spammers.

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DT 26044

by tilsit  

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26044

God Save the Nina!

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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment *****

I think I shall start this review by introducing you to a new word. Or at least a word whose meaning you are not familiar with. NINA. What is it, O wise one, you ask? Well, gentle reader, it’s a word that has been adapted by crossword setters to mean something hidden in a crossword that you may not be aware of. Quite a few puzzles have Ninas, although you’d never know if you were not looking for them.

The Nina is actually named after the daughter of American artist Al Hirschfeld, who would hide things in his drawings that are related to Nina, his daughter. And so crossword setters happily nicked the idea for their puzzles as well. Some contain little messages like HAPPY BIRTHDAY or suchlike around the perimeter or in the rows between the answers. Sometimes some of the answers are linked in a sort of private joke. Some of you may know that I compile puzzles for the Independent General Knowledge Jumbo series (as Harbinger, I’m in this Saturday’s paper by the way!) and in July, a puzzle of mine read HAPPY BIRTHDAY BERYL across the top, as a tribute to my lovely sister who was celebrating her birthday on the day it was published. The Sunday Telegraph recently had a General Knowledge puzzle where a lot of the answers were the names of Toughie Crossword compilers. The Telegraph Crossword actually has a sort of famous history of Ninas going back to World War II, where the then setter Leonard Dawe published several puzzles that inadvertently contained the top secret codenames of the D-Day beaches just before the landings happened, and he was hauled in for questioning.   Although that article says it was coincidence, Dawe was a teacher and used to encourage his pupils, some of whom were sons of RAF Officers, to supply words for him to put in the puzzles.

Anyway, back to 2009. Last Saturday’s puzzle was a tribute to our very own Big Dave and this site, and while it is tempting to think of our host as a dementia-ridden nun who likes to sing God Save The Queen, I think that would have been going a bit too far. Although Mrs BD may like to produce evidence!

This was quite a nice puzzle and certainly an improvement on the previous week. There were some lovely clues and as I solved it, I began to see one or two things appearing. So let’s have a look….

Don’t forget to vote on it at the end of the blog by clicking on the star rating, and have your say in the comment boxes at the very end. Newer posters sometimes take a little while for their posts to appear as their posts are moderated.

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DT 26038

by tilsit  

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26038

The Big Ones Get Away!

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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment **

Having been a solver for many years, I always looked forward to Saturday’s puzzles. Each paper usually offered you more than one puzzle, and invariably, the puzzle you got on a Saturday was something special. Sadly I don’t feel that magic with the Telegraph puzzle. It’s an OK challenge, but I don’t get to feel the magic that you get with other papers and setters. This week’s contained a couple of good clues, but they were taken down by the two long answers in the centre. Both were clued with cryptic definitions, and while you could argue one was reasonable, I simply had not heard of the expression, and the other struck me as too remote and obscure to lead to the answer. The grid itself didn’t help with the centre almost isolated. I recognised the across answer, but had to guess at the down one. Even an anagram might have helped a bit.

Anyway, whine over, off we go. Your comments as to how you coped with the puzzle are welcomed.

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Toughie 222

by tilsit  

Toughie No 222 by Excalibur

You Pays Your Money……

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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment **

I subscribe on a monthly basis to Telegraph Crosswords which means I pay £60 a year for my puzzles.

However, It’s days like today that I wonder why I bothered. When I was a lot younger my mum and dad used to get the Weekend Magazine, which was I suppose the Hello or OK!! of its day. A heady mix of salubrious celebrity tittle tattle and some rather curious adverts that baffled a prepubescent teenager and one of its features was The Stinker Crossword set by our setter today, described as being the toughest of its kind. As someone who had become spellbound by cryptic crosswords I could only look at it and wait for the solution to see what was going on. Even when I saw the solution, a lot of what I saw bemused me, and I waited until my dear old Latin Master spent lunchtimes explaining the magic of cryptics to me using the Guardian, Times and Telegraph. In all honesty, this puzzle might as well have been from that era given the language of the cluewriting and the words used. For the first 60 minutes today, I couldn’t work out a single clue. It’s rather strange as I tackle the Listener, Azed and Enigmatic Variations on a regular basis and can usually make a decent start, even if I don’t always finish it without resorting to dictionaries.

It is very noticeable that this setter seems to like using grids that contain answers with the minimum of checking letters and here we have another grid like that with ten of the answers having less than 50% of their letters intersecting. This means you can end up trying to guess and answer from a pattern such as * I *E * I * C*. Grossly unfair. The surface readings and accepted devices seem to be happily sacrificed at the altar of fairness. The Monday Maestro consistently manages to provide good surface readings and accurate cluemanship. Here it is not a case of hitting the bullseye, but just about scraping the outside of the target in quite a number of instances.

There are some decent clues in this puzzle, but they are outweighed by the puzzle’s inadequacies, of which there are many. There are a couple of answers where I have used my solving aid called TEA, and would not have finished without it, as I cannot make out the way the clue works. I am sure my esteemed colleagues will make more sense of those clues.

I don’t mind a tough challenge, but this is not tough, just inadequate.

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DT 26041

by tilsit  

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26041

One Banana, Two Banana, Three Banana Four…….

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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment: ***

Greetings from the rain-kissed paradise that is the Calder Valley.  A nice friendly puzzle  that shouldn’t cause too much trouble to newer solvers, although a couple of clues require a careful reading of the words.  I also thought there were rather a lot of anagrams (eleven actually, especially of short words and five out of the first six clues), which can suggest a little laziness on behalf of the setter, although here the surface readings of clues are generally very good.

As usual, the answers are  “hidden” inside the curly brackets.  Highlighting them will reveal all.  At the end of the blog, you can click on the star rating to show your opinion on the puzzle, and of course, you are welcome to have your say at the end and newer posters should note that their first posts sometimes take a little while to appear due to having to be moderated to check for spammers.

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DT 26032

by tilsit  

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26032

A full analysis by Tilsit

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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment: ***

My first bite at the Saturday Puzzle, and until this week it has tended to be the last of the weekend puzzles that I solve, simply because the others usually have themes or gimmicks that I love to solve.  In most papers the Saturday puzzle is usually the most difficult of the week, but I don’t think this applies to the DT.  However, it will now be the top of the list each week.  I hope my reviews are as helpful as Peter’s were and if not, I’m sure you’ll let me know.

This was an interesting puzzle and is a curious mix of clues with some fine ones, plus one or two duds.  The Telegraph is spoilt for cryptic definition clue writers, as Monday’s Maestro is probably one of the finest exponents of this genre around, and I sometimes think that even he overeggs the pudding occasionally.  As a result, other attempts at cryptic definitions often hit the target, but not the bull, to use an expression from archery.

Anyway, let’s have a look at last Saturday’s challenge.  One of the first things I notice is the brevity of clue writing in most cases.  On first inspection that suggests to me a preponderance of cryptic definitions.  Let’s see if I’m right.

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DT 26035

by tilsit  

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26035

A Grumpy Old Man writes……

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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **

Greetings from the Calder Valley  where I have been largely incarcerated in my flat , as the old illness has been playing up.  One of the joys of my imprisonment, apart from the chance to get my blood nice and angry watching the Jeremy Kyle Show and other daytime delights, has been that I have been solving (and compiling) quite a few crosswords from all of the national newspapers.

This has left me in a bit of a dilemma about today’s cryptic.  While I am sure that a few of you will feel happy about it because you have been able to solve it, I actually feel cheated of a challenge with it. I just felt it was not worthy of its place in a national newspaper. Some of the clues were utterly dreadful and downright unfair.    If you are asked to name a little boy, would you think of the answer NAT?  An answer worthy of the new BBC2 daytime quiz show Pointless, where the object is to get answers no-one thinks of.

I am not sure who the setter was today but it was almost my fastest Telegraph solve of all time.

Time for you to feel the love.

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Toughie 214

by tilsit  

Toughie No 214 by Messinae

Messinae Magic!

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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****

A lovely  Toughie today, worthy of the title and set by one of my favourite setters Messinae.   A nice feeling came over me when I entered the last answer, and  I was able to look back on a good fight with the compiler.

As usual, feel free to add your comments afterwards, and don’t forget to add a star rating as well.

Couple of grumbles with the website clues in the Java version.  No link between 1a and 10a at 1 across and an apostrophe missed off 8 down, which made the clue look wrong.

Off we go!

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DT 26029

by tilsit  

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26029

All Puzzled Out!

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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***

Greetings from the Peoples’ Republic of Hebden Bridge, and before I start, a quick word of thanks to Gazza for covering last Thursday’s Toughie for me at short notice. I must confess to feeling somewhat drained as I have managed to do the Telegraph, Guardian, Independent and Times puzzles today. I figured that one or two might have something special going on (09/09/09), and was right. Today’s Telegraph wasn’t one of them, but then I wasn’t expecting it to be.

I wrote last week about clues hitting the target, but not the bullseye or gold and today’s puzzle is like that. The surface reading of some clues is off the mark, and others just seem inaccurate (What is a carbon-free decree?) Should we expect our clues to make sense, or are we spoilt when some setters spend their time achieving accuracy in their surface readings? As an aspiring compiler, I spend a lot of my time trying to write clues that read well and make sense both literally and factually. The fact that many of my attempts end up in the waste or recycle bin because they don’t must say something.

I found today’s DT puzzle to be reasonable, nothing more or less. There was nothing in there that really troubled me and I would be terribly surprised if most of the regulars felt differently. What I did miss was anything to make me smile and I did find that in abundance in the other three daily puzzles I solved. I did deliberately make sure this was the first one I solved today, but it just seemed rather humdrum, I’m afraid.

As usual, I’d love to see your thoughts, and you can leave them after the blog. Newer visitors should note that the clue answers are hidden between the curly brackets, and you need to highlight between the brackets with your mouse to view them. New message posters should note that your first post also takes a little while to appear, as they are moderated for spammers.

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